Mad Max Fury Road poster
Author: Bert Ehrmann
Dangerous Universe has been Bert’s web playground since 1998 when personal web sites were a rarity rather than the norm.
Halt and Catch Fire season 2 clip
2015 Summer movie preview
With three movies due out it seems as if Marvel Entertainment has bought and now owns the naming rights to summer. The first of which is The Avengers: Age of Ultron on May 1. Really The Avengers Part 2, or is it Iron Man Part 5…, Age of Ultron has the whole team back together again battling the robotic Ulton, one of the most iconic Avengers villains. Much like with the first Avengers flick, the fate of the very Earth will hang in the balance in this film!
Except since there are two more Marvel movies out this summer and a whole slew of Marvel films scheduled for theaters all the way up until 2019, I think the fate of the Earth has already been decided in a corporate board room.
Mr. Road Warrior himself Mad Max returns to the hellish highways of the apocalypse on May 15 in Max Max: Fury Road. This fourth outing for the character, with Tom Hardy in the title role and co-starring Charlize Theron, has Max trying to rescue a group of fellow apocalyptic travelers from the clutches of a crazed outlaw gang of motorheads.
In other words: More merry Mad Max mayhem!
A remake of the family-scarer Poltergeist is out May 22. I’m interested in this one, if just because the original 1982 film about a girl vanished into the guts of a family’s haunted house gave me the heebie-jeebies as a youngster. I mean, Poltiergeist has one of the kids in the movie being practically eaten alive by a tree one minute and terrorized by a clown doll the next. C’MON!
It helps that this new Poltergeist is being produced by Evil Dead horror auteur Sam Raimi too.
A fourth Jurassic Park movie, Jurassic World, is set to bring a little chaos to theaters June 12. While this is being billed as a sequel to the first three films from 1993 to 2001, to me Jurassic World looks to be an reboot of the Jurassic Park franchise as a whole. The trailer for this one has a slew of people visiting Jurassic Park when something goes wrong that turns loose the dinosaurs to chomp on some unsuspecting folks. Or, it’s a bigger version of Jurassic Park sans the guiding hands of Steven Spielberg.
Terminator: Genesys, the fifth film of that franchise, will “be back” in theaters July 1 with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Due to the vagaries of time travel, this time he’s joined by a young Sarah Connor (now Emilia Clarke) as the two along with Reese (now Jai Courtney) fight off a bunch of different and deadly terminators out to put an end to the Connor timeline once and for all. Or at least until the next movie.
Marvel movie #2 is Ant-Man out July 17. There’s not too much known about this one other than it stars Paul Rudd in the title role of a superhero who can turn incredibly small. But if Ant-Man follows the Marvel Mold™ of late it’s no doubt that the fate of the planet will be in Ant-Man’s teeny-tiny hands.
A fifth Mission: Impossible movie, simply titled Mission: Impossible 5, is out July 31. Even though I probably shouldn’t I’ve enjoyed the Mission: Impossible movies since the first one was released in ’96. Even if the missions the M:I teams have gone on over the years/sequels have gone from impossible to impossibler to “there’s no way in heck they’d be able to do any of this stuff whatsoever!”
The final Marvel movie out this summer, that’s really a Sony one, is Fantastic Four. A reboot of the Fantastic Four films from 2005 and ’07, this version looks to put a new, darker spin on the big four. Or, if it works it could be the dawn of a new age in the tone of comic book movies but if it doesn’t we might just have another Catwoman on our hands.
Premiering on TV screens before Mission: Impossible in 1964 was Man from U.N.C.L.E., the first series to take inspiration from the James Bond films to a TV series. Now a film version of U.N.C.L.E. is set to close the summer movie season August 14. This 1960s period piece seems to be equal parts Jason Bourne and Austin Powers.
Who Invented Choose Your Own Adventure?
Robotech: The Gateway Anime
I was an impressionable 10 year old when the animated TV series Robotech first premiered here in 1985. Back then the TV landscape was very much different that it was today, especially with kid’s cartoons. Now, cartoons air 24/7 on a variety of specific channels and via streaming services too. But back in 1985 cartoons only really aired Saturday mornings and for a few hours after school on one or two channels.
I hate to admit it but looking back for the most part cartoons of 30 years ago weren’t very good. Until I started rewatching cartoons as an adult I thought most of the ones I used to watch as a kid were brilliant. And while I might still love say classic G.I. Joe and Transformers cartoons, the stories these two shows told were cliched and childish where even though characters were trying to kill one and other no one really got hurt and no one ever died.
That’s part of the reason Robotech is so memorable to me, why it’s so different from its contemporaries.
Robotech told one long story over 85 episodes and three different series. Characters in Robotech grew and changed and shockingly enough some actually died. Watching Robotech again today I’m amazed at just what weighty subjects the show told. It’s almost like Robotech was an adult themed show in the guise of a children’s cartoon. And the design and art of the show was like nothing I’d ever seen before outside feature film animation.
Years before computer 3D effects would make such things easy Robotech had jets that could turn into robots fighting alien ships which must’ve taken countless hours to animate by hand.
The story of Robotech is deceptively simple. On the eve of a third world war a gigantic alien spacecraft crashes onto the Earth and the governments of the world unite to explore and figure out uses for this new technology. Fast forward a few years to the launch of the SDF-1, a gigantic ship built from the wreck and tech of this ship when the aliens who lost the ship in the first place come looking for it. But when we use this new “Robotech” technology to fight back it malfunctions and sends the ship to Pluto where the survivors of the battle must fight their way through the solar system to get home.
And this was just the first series. The other two dealt with the continuation of this war into the future to a post apocalyptic end.
To a kid who’d grown up assured via cartoons that the good guys always win and that the bad guys can always parachute out of their exploding helicopters before hitting the ground, Robotech came as a bit of a revelation. I’d never seen anything like it before and I’m not sure there’d been any show up to that point to deal with all the stuff in Robotech before.
Even so, there were only a few of us at school who were into Robotech. The show aired at the staggering early time of 6:30AM against things like the early news and the farm report. It was on so early that I used to get up, watch Robotech and go back to bed for an hour before I had to really get up for school.
So, at least in our area, Robotech was never as popular as the other cartoons even though there were the usual tie-in comic books, toys and action figures to go along with the series. After the original Robotech series ended that was pretty much it for Robotech for the next few years.
While Robotech is still very much outside the mainstream for people like me who grew up with the show or came to discover it later it was world changing. I don’t think after seeing Robotech I could take other cartoons that didn’t take on real-world topics like Robotech as seriously as before. Where’s the fun in watching a show like Voltron that also had gigantic robots facing off against aliens when each week’s episode was almost a mirror of what had come before when I could be watching Robotech instead?
It’s been a few years since the last time I sat down to watch episodes of Robotech and probably decades since I’ve watched the series as a whole. But if this is any indication as to how much the series meant, no, means to me whenever I play a clip of the Robotech title sequence and the synthetic violin strings start up there’s a chill of excitement that goes up my spine where I’m 10 years old again up too early to catch my favorite cartoon on TV.